First Citizens staff lose huge payday

Several staff members of Trinidad’s First Citizens Bank lost out on the huge return investors got when the bank offered shares to the public and allocated shares to the staff in August 2013.

The shares, which were very attractively priced at $22 and at an attractive PE, exhibited all the signs of a big pay day. So attractive was the issue, that IC Insider immediately placed the stock on our Buy Rated list from the IPO opened. Surprisingly, information obtained from the Trinidad & Tobago Stock Exchange was that a large percentage of the bank’s staff never bought shares that were allocated to them. As such, the excess was made available to the public who clamoured for more shares. Employees of the bank bought only 3.78 million units accounting for 7.8 percent of the amount offered and just more than half of their entitlement.

The stock price has since hit $40.63, a gain of on 84.6 percent. In addition the bank declared a $1.09 per share final dividend that will be paid January 24, 2014 to shareholders on record as of December 31, 2013. The dividend is equivalent to a 12 percent rate of return on the IPO price. When the dividend is added to the return of the stock price, the result is a 96 percent gain on investment in just five months.

Based on the 2013 results, IC Insider returned the stock to the Buy Rated list and projects the stock price to exceed $50 per share during the course of 2014. Those are huge returns in a country where interest rates on money market instruments are below 5 percent.

The IPO was heavily subscribed as $3.3 billion chased $1 billion of shares that were on offer leading to a massive oversubscription for the 48 million First Citizens Bank shares. While the staff only picked up a portion, there were 12,435 applicants who got less shares than they wanted.